Reach
by soaring-smiles
Summary: They don't stop. They know enough now, to not ever stop. [11/Rose]


**In which reunions are not fairy tales, and he loves too many people not to get hurt.**

**Feedback of any kind is appreciated, as always.**

* * *

He's just rounding the corner to the TARDIS, when everything seems to swirl and dip and blaze in his head. _No_, he thinks, the word ragged and drunk in his head. His fingers clench around empty space.

A blonde figure is curled up against the TARDIS doors, knees drawn up to her chest tightly, and even from this distance, he can see the breaths-_sobs?_-that make her shoulders waver.

Oh.

Oh, _Rose_.

She raises her head at the sound of his approaching footsteps, eyes red, mascara smeared down her face. There's a bruise on her cheek, and she looks so young his hearts ache. Slowly, warily, he kneels in front of her.

"Rose," he says quietly, the word drifting across the air between them.  
"Stubborn thing, you. Could never…" He raises a hand and brushes it across her forehead. "You always come back to me, don't you?" A brief, painful smile flits across his mouth.

She creeps tighter into herself. "Everything's gone," she whispers. "Everyone except you."

"I'm sorry."

She leans forward, and he presses an arm around her waist, her head against the bone of his shoulder. "I used to think I didn't know how you felt," she breathes. "I do now." He feels damp cotton on his skin, and tastes the metallic acrid wrongness of another universe.

"You shouldn't be here," he says, pulling her to curve against him, warmth seeping through the thin layer of her shirt. "I don't think I care anymore."

Rose half-laughs, half-cries. "There's nothing to care about," she says brokenly, and he traces the gunmetal scars, the ridges on her spine, like they mean something. In his head, a war plays over, and it's not his own. Blood spiders out onto his shirt, and trickles of it line down her mouth and nostrils.

He lifts her up, back pressed against the wooden doors of the TARDIS, and light breaks over the marks and raised lines that scatter across her skin.

"He liked to watch us dance," she explains woodenly, and almost collapses once the doors are open. Her weight is less than what it should be, her bones fragile under his palms.

Panic begins to choke him, rise up his throat like fire, makes his skin burn.

"Who?" he asks, lifting her, running to the medical bay. She smiles through the blood falling down her chin, and he is saving her too slowly. Crimson blooms out against the white table, grotesquely pretty. Her chest rises and falls erratically. Operating instruments tremble in his hands.

"He called himself the Master," she murmurs. "He knew; he always knew…"

"Stay with me," he begs. "For Rassilon's sake, Rose, for mine." The needle sinks into her skin, and her eyelids flutter shut.

"He let me go," she whispers, and passes into unconsciousness while he removes the blade two inches deep into her side. The knife is marked by circles intricately linked.

_You're welcome_, it says.

Later, he will throw it into an exploding supernova while she sleeps.

* * *

It takes hours, maybe. Her body, sewn together with thread and hope, the stitches uncertain and unreliable. Cracked ribs, and scars from a whip- he nearly cries at that- her bullet wounds riddling the lines of her back. He finds a tattoo on her ankle -_mine_- and lasers it out.

Then he exits the room, carefully, and leans against the hallway, eyes blank. Time loses meaning. He thinks of the man he knew, and wonders if the parallel was just as sadistic.

He doesn't want to know.

When he gets back, Rose is sleeping peacefully, unmarked, body working perfectly. He trails a hand through her hair, feeling the longer strands against his fingertips, gold and soft. She takes in a breath, and he sinks into a chair and watches her until her eyes open.

"Did you fix me?" she asks quietly. Her voice is scratched. "You always do."

"Yeah," he says, and holds her hand like it'll save her life. Maybe it did. "I always will."

When she turns to look at him, he sees nothing but her hollow, empty features. "He blew up the universe, but sent me through to this one. Why?"

And she expects him to have all the answers, Rose, doesn't she?

"He wanted me to see you die," he says eventually. "And you nearly did."

Weakly, she raises herself up, something-anything-beginning to flicker in her eyes. "I could have been happy," she says. "Me and...and the other Doctor, we would have been happy."

"Yeah, I know."

She's not what she was when he left her. Neither is he. New faultlines, shifting plates, her vulnerability bleeding through the cracks in her melting armour. And he, and he, _he_ is so, _so_ alone.

"Stay with me," he says, staring up at the spotless ceiling. "I don't have anybody. I did. Then I didn't. Stay."

"I lost everything."

"Oh Rose." He smiles, and it feels like nothing at all. "So did I."

* * *

She sleeps in his bed, now, because of the nightmares.

Her screams sear themselves into his mind, the way she gasps for air, back arching and lip bitten so hard she breaks the skin. He grasps at her shoulders and rocks her back and forth until she falls asleep again.

Nothing else. She dreams and he watches, too terrified to touch her. He knows how that dance ends; in beaches and wolves and neverending slate-grey sky.

He always holds her hand when they leave the TARDIS, and she clings just as tight.

"Does it count now," he asks, "if I say it?"

She presses her head into his shoulder and they watch the sky explode. Ribbons of colour, bursting and charging, showering into sparks that never hit the ground. She chose the silent ones; he agrees. Something about the incessant bangs never fail to set his teeth grinding.

"I don't know," she says eventually, the soft exhale of air against his neck. "I used to dream of it, before Davros. And then the Doctor…he said it all the time, before he died. I don't know if you should. The universe doesn't like it much."

"Fuck the universe," he says, but never quite makes it past that.

* * *

Some days are better than others. She laughs and cracks jokes and runs with him through time and they almost feel an echo of their old selves. For a moment, an hour, he can remember things like New York and centurions and be perfectly fine.

Other days, he keeps seeing Amy in corners, stumbles into Rory into corridors. _Goodbye raggedy man_, she said, but he never, he _never_-

Sometimes, he wishes he was a different man.

And her bad days too, the ones where she flinches when the TARDIS moves too roughly, and where he finds her under the covers, not moving, her whole body tense.

"I was moving on," he says to her on one of his mornings. "I didn't need you anymore. The whole of space and time…I was happy, I think."

"But then the angels," she finishes, and he puts the cup in the sink too hard.

The china crashes against the metal, and he thinks of red convertibles and weddings- and ever-present selfish _grief_.

"She would have liked you," he says roughly, and she watches him sadly, her fingertips dancing on the countertop. "_They_ would have liked you."

And he ruins them, yes, but they ruin him too.

* * *

He takes her to Barcelona, the city not the planet. They go to the beach, and she nearly gets lost in the crowd. He tilts his head up to feel the sun, the heat stretching through him like honey. Her fingers are twined in his, and the cloudless day illuminates her face.

She looks at him.

"I think we might be okay now," she decides. Her thin dress sways around her knees lightly, and ice-cream drips down her wrist. He's bought her a bracelet, and it glimmers in the sun. A little later, he'll give her the necklace in his pocket- the one he's had in there for centuries.

She tastes sweet, like he thought, and sad, like he knows. They look like nothing more than a couple kissing on the beach, but to him it's over half a millennia in coming. Back in the TARDIS he runs his hands over her bare skin, and she sighs.

They don't stop. They know enough now, to not ever stop.

* * *

He's had enough of lying to people he cares about, and Rose was always guileless, anyway. He remembers when they danced across constellations, and didn't even care to pick up the pieces of the mess they left behind. When he was prettier, and she was still naïve enough to think the universe would always swing their way.

He varies between extreme nostalgia and disgust at himself these days, the pity, the _humanness_ of what he used to be. And sometimes, he catches her looking at him, and knows she is seeing freckles and rage and a manic, crooked grin. That's okay. He glances at her some days, and sees narrow legs and orange, flame-touched hair, and the first face this one ever saw.

But they learn. The past is gone, and the future is uncertain at best. In the end, they've only got now, and he loves her, even if he'll never say. He's going to love the girl who took Time into her heart for a very, very long time.

(they don't talk about forever anymore)

* * *

Once he wasn't willing to shatter two universes for her.

He thinks he's got his priorities straight, this time around.


End file.
